White clover at sunset

OK, maybe not sunset but late evening sun at least. This is a white clover in my garden. The sun is setting and the last rays of sun are disappearing. This lone clover was left alone in the sun, contrasted against the dark shadows in my backyard.

I have submitted a photo to this week's Twitter's Photo Challenge already, but it was too tempting not to shoot yet another photo based on the topic "Contrast" when I saw this.

Details

I took this photo with a cheap (but fun!) Tamron 70-300 lens at 300mm and set to macro mode (1:2). This is as close as it will focus, so depth of field is very shallow. To combat camera shake -- I took this hand held -- I set ISO to 800, the camera to aperture priority f/11 and underexposed two stops to avoid burnt out whites in the clover. The great side effect of this was that the shadows in the background was brought almost to black.

f/11 really is too little when playing around with the macro mode -- on close inspection you'll see that not every leaf of the clover is sharp. But this was a tradeoff between ISO (noise) and handholdabilily (if that's a word), so I'm pretty satisfied with the result all things considered.